This AI Bot Runs Events, Roasts Players And Delivers 2x Community Engagement

[Music] Hello world. Welcome to the pocket gamer.biz podcast. I'm your host Peggy Ansels, but more importantly is our guest because we are diving into the most talked about topic in the industry right now, which is of course AI. What else would it be? But it's not enough to just like talk about, you know, what is it? Where is it going? We're looking at what it really means to go allin. You know, what is AI native from the ground up? Well, I'm excited because I have Simon Davis. He is CEO of Goat Gaming. He is here. Hello, Simon.
Hi, Peggy. Nice to be on. Well, as I said, it's about what you're doing, but also about your platform because you are the leading gaming platform on Telegram, which is something I don't think everyone out there really realizes what

the opportunity is because over 6 million active users. And you have even bigger than those numbers, the big bold vision for how AI can change everything we know about community management. So, everything probably about games as well for that matter. And that's just the start. So, let's just dive in there. Let's get in there. And first of all, um, yeah, we're lucky to have you because it's a it's a vision that you have made happen. How long did it actually take to come from the idea AI is changing everything, so I'm going to have it change this as well?
We started working with AI in 2022. Yeah. We were working on a game called Mighty Action Heroes and the vision was that every hero would be unique. So my co-founder said to me, "Oh, that's 25 million heroes." And I was just like, "Well, that's that's why you're paid what you're paid. Figure it out."
Um, so so eventually we landed on procedurally generated content, which is

basically the precursor to today's generative AI models. And so we were playing with that and so we were very early to start adopting all the latest tools and developments and genai. you know, we used uh stable diffusions tools. We wor with scenario like a bunch of different partners.
And so we ended up kind of building this Voltron which was combination of these commercially available tools then plus our own tooling and pipeline on top of that and then training it all on our own content. So that we had full artistic ownership of anything that was created and we went from you know taking two, three, four weeks to create a 3D character from scratch to something that could be done in a day
complete with animations. I think the other advantage that we had which is really an accident. Uh it's just geography. So we're based in Singapore.
Uh a lot of the team is Chinese speaking and it's no secret that Chinese AI is also really at the cutting edge and so we have people that are very deep into the Chinese AI communities and so they would then bring these tools over into Mighty Bear and you know they'd explain

the UI which was all in Chinese and they would find a way to integrate these and and learn from them as well. fun. I think also geography helped us just with people being more receptive to it.
Yeah.
I think culturally like Singapore, Asia more broadly is more open to AI where I think in Europe and Europe especially and North America like there's kind of more resistance.
Yes. It's a little bit of like well it's something new what can we do about it to keep it sort of you know keep the genie a little bit but you can't you absolutely can't. And so yeah, it's fortunate for you and uh fortunate for us because you are on that cutting edge and you have brought that all together in uh Goat Gaming. But I want to just go back to something I said at the start because I know I speak with a lot of studios, a lot of marketers and they're like, "Oh, channels, what channel? What can we do? We need to diversify." And that's where it plays out for you because look at this Telegram. I mean a lot of listeners may think of it as just a bit of a messaging app but you call it

the next Facebook moment. Why why are you so convinced?
You know people say content is king
but I say distribution is god
and telegram puts you in the pockets of a billion consumers who are starved for content. And so you have a billion monthly active users all over the world. The app has a built-in wallet so you can pay with fiat or crypto. It even has yield bearing assets now in the wallet. people in some countries are using it as a um essentially as a bank account. And so you have these, you know, billion users with nothing to do like big social graph and you can deploy content they can start playing straight away and start engaging with their friends. And so last year we saw games get up to nine figures in store base. Um just goes to show like the size of the opportunity and the scale of the network on on Telegram. And so yeah, when I see this, I'm reminded of the earliest days of kind of Facebook gaming. That to me is the parallel.
Well, I love it. We land on the big and the bold and the exciting and and Brian appears. Brian, my co-host.

Hi, Brian.
It's lovely to meet you, Simon. It's a pleasure to have you on. I've been listening with great interest to what you were saying about Telegram. And one of the things that strikes me is that so many uh studios out there and developers out there complain about the oversaturation of the various storefronts and the Epic Store, the App Store, Google Play, and yet they ignore so many of the other opportunities out there to to connect with a huge existing audience. So why is it you think that that developers are not yet engaging with Telegram or or necessarily taking it seriously as a as an option for their games? So I think the first one is just geography but telegram primarily is big in you know Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and then in the west to a lesser extent and so
you know unless you're particularly techsavvy or in the crypto community or certain other subgroups that use telegram like you're probably not using telegram dayto-day so it's not top of mind for them. Um, and then I think the

other thing is just honestly I think that there is a uh degree of elitism around messenger games and
you know I I can tell my own story. So I come from console like back in the day. I remember when I went to work on freetoplay games. I went to make browser games in the late 2000s when browser games were just printing money. And I showed up and I was like these games are really rubbish. Like I'm going to come here and show them how to make a good game and then we'll print money. And I got there and I realized actually like there was a real art to the games that were making. There was a reason those games were so successful and they were serving an audience need. And I think a lot of development studios especially like smaller ones tend to want to create like these big narrative experiences which are fine or like you know double A games and these games have to run on a low-end device in a browser window and they have to be accessible and so there is an art to building those kind of experiences but not every developer is really up for that. When I heard about what you're doing, I'm like, "Wow, this is really something because you aren't just experimenting. You've gone all in

on AI." I mean, that's brave. That's bold. But what does it mean to rebuild your entire studio around AI?
So, just as a starting point for us, you know, we took an AI native approach across the board. So the art team's pipeline since I was telling you at the beginning since 2022 2023 has been completely rebuilt. So the way the artists work is that we have a series of tools that we've built in house uh and our own workflows and everything is essentially prompt based now
with some adjusting. And so I was asking my co-founder this the other day. He's like what percentage of time do you think artists are spending actually painting now is like probably less than 2% maybe one. um engineers are using you know tools like clawed code a lot more aggressively. So um I have this thesis which is going to be very unpopular but essentially things like drawing and coding are going the way of woodworking and blacksmithing.

But yeah some people might make a little artisan business out of it but essentially like these process are becoming you know for one of a better word industrialized through AI and people using prompts and building workflows around that. Um, you know, we have a finance team is building their own AI tools just for, you know, uh, reconciling receipts and updating the database. You just take a picture and everything is automated. Like, we basically automate everything now internally. It's taken a while to get there and not everyone was fully on board with it, but we basically built a team that is fully plugged in and everyone actually ships software. So, I'm not a developer. I've just bring the finishing touches on an app that I've been building using AI. our marketing team is building their own mini apps to test growth techniques on Telegram. So you have marketing teams like shipping software. Um and so across the board like it's like we basically rebuilt the or around people being able to architect and solve their own problems.
I'm just I'm just digesting that one Brian you know I mean at one level it's

like yes I can see it. Um it unlocks creativity. I mean here you are Simon you don't have to code right? You don't have to worry about it. But uh yeah, that one about uh going the way of artisan, that's that's not going to sit well with our audience, Brian.
No, I'm sure it won't. But it's just you can't the genie is not going back in the bottle. You have two choices. You can adapt or you can retrain and you know, choose a different field where you don't have to use AI. But like I really do think it's that binary and it's really just a question of time. You know, internally I set a target at the beginning of 2023 that 50% of our art should be AI generated. We actually hit it in May of 2023. Today, like that figure is like 90 over 99%. And it's going the same way for code.
The fact that so many people within the game sector refuse to engage in the conversation um does not mean that it's not happening or that it's not going to radically change the sector. Um, and I mean we know that you you've gone so far

as to say this is an extinction level event for for game studios. Do you stand by that?
Yeah, I've actually been speaking to other founders recently who are either in my network or people that reached out and just asked for like advice on how to get their to make the change. And it's very interesting like I do think that look you have a team that maybe has 10 15 people but they're all like using AI throughout their pipelines. they can basically like out compete a team of 100 with, you know, onetenth of the cost. And so if you're a large scale team and you're not employing these tools and you're just like, you know, I was speaking to someone else that has a very large studio in South Asia doing like lowcost outsourcing and his whole USP is his guys cost like three to 500 bucks a month. It's like that business is cooked. There's just no need for it. Mhm.
And likewise, like I think
yeah, like I think manufacturing is a good example here. Like if you have workshops that are doing everything by hand, you've got someone who's using a

machine or a production line, like production line wins out over time. So yeah, I do think that studios have to adapt. Obviously, there's going to be cases of, you know, boutique indies that have this super loyal fan base that will buy their games and they'll wait three, four years for them. That's fine. But that's not the case for most of us. Most of us are not making the next SU Valley or you know one of those games that have this like super dedicated hardcore indie audience and we're just trying to survive in this industry especially on mobile. I don't think you really have a choice. I thought it was very interesting that Hilka from Supell
was talking a lot about how they're pushing into AI and they've spun up an R&D team in
in SF and I have no doubt that internally that's going to be a big challenge for him because it's a huge challenge for us like to change that mindset and some people chose to leave and other people were attracted by the proposition of working how we work. So I think it's going to be a huge thing for many studios over the next couple of years. What made me excited about having you as our guest, Simon, is there's a

little emotive level here, right? Not just the effect of emotive. And that's exciting because that's all wrapped up in Amy, which is an AI community agent, right? And it's not just a chatbot. She she plays the games, she roasts the players, she runs competitions. Um, why Amy? Let's just talk about the spark behind building her in the first place because uh I also know the company Allison.ai AI and I was talking to the founder there and he's like yeah we said Allison because you know it's it's it's got the AI but it's also female it sounds helpful and I'm thinking oh Amy female helpful what role does that play there so unpack that for us
just through our own research we realized that most of these AI system bots for some reason female except maybe Claude is the famous exception
uh but generally they tend to have uh women's names and uh I guess like

a more kind of friendly, relaxed personality along with that and it just seems to resonate with the users. So that's why we picked Amy. But Amy initially was very bland and like I started like chatting to her and I was like this is this feels like something IBM made like it's got no personality. I okay like she needs to have a bit of an edge. She's meant to be a gamer. And so we spent a lot of time like tuning her so that she's actually fun. And so like she'll roast players in the chat. She'll host her event. She's in goat gaming. She's competing against human players. And we say, "Look, you're playing against an AI. Like, the odds are that you're going to lose. You're going to lose badly. But if you do happen to win, like this is the prize." And so, we give bigger prizes if you beat her, but it's quite expensive to like compete against her. It's kind of counterbalanced.
Um, yeah. And so, she's been fantastic, you know, since we added her to the community. Um I think like community engagement when she runs events or is like 3 to 500x sorry 3 to 5x what it is

in days when she's not there.
Wow.
And since we added her like average community engagement basically doubled like overnight. So, she's interesting like I think this is a paradigm shift in gaming because you're already seeing that like people are making AI Kos content creators and so it naturally follows that there's going to be an agent that is associated with an ecosystem or a studio that then like hangs out with the players and provides them with additional engagement be it in like Discord, Telegram, um maybe she has her own apps which is actually something I've been working on. So like there's a whole suite of products tied to AM. So like I don't know if you look at the app stores a lot but some of the apps have been doing very well. I can tell basically I generated and they seem to be like utility apps. There's things like weight loss, horoscope, tarot reading and so I've been thinking of ways where maybe Amy can just do that with players and they can chat with her. They do chat to her every day and she can do other things and provide other kind of ways of engaging and entertaining. And so
as a game studio that becomes really

interesting. It's like you have your core products, but then you have your AI agent that's also providing additional like games and services to players and keeping them engaged socially.
Wow, there's a lot there, Brian. You know, you thought of a sudden then you have your AI agent has, you know, its own what mini games, little mini apps, little mini universe. Um, wow.
It makes perfect sense and and it kind of it it squares that circle. So it brings together the not just the game but all of the experiences and community around that particular game. If you're a games company, building that presence and building, you know, an agent that can be the focal point means that you have a way of getting your players to jump into all of these different experiences and create other doorways um into your company and your services uh for people who are maybe not, you know, hardcore gamers. And was Amy kind of um scripted? Was she for did she come into

being fully formed or is she learning and kind of finding her own personality?
It's one of the things about working with AI is that there's a lot of unintended consequences.
And so, you know, like we all update one thing and all of a sudden she's, you know, she's going off script like promising players stuff that's like, oh, she shouldn't be saying that. So, yeah, like it's a it's an iterative process. The tools get better literally every month. Though
when I look back to the to March, April, and the tools I was using compared to what I'm using now, honestly feels like it was a stone age.
It's very hard to overstate the speed of development in this space. Like I've never seen anything like it my whole career and it's only accelerating. And so what we have today is going to look like really primitive in six 12 months time. And in that process, what what have you learned about her role within community dynamics? And how do you deal with some of those issues? You know, do you have to constantly monitor her just

to make sure that she's not hallucinating or promising the world?
It's funny, we actually built tools to track her. So like we get like AI generated summaries of her behavior every day.
So we get like daily reports and we can see what she's been saying and the sent like when people have been pinging her, the questions they've been asking. And so we have a team that's just dedicated toward to optimizing and improving Amy over time. And so because we see that as like
a very important product pillar uh you know there could be uses for Amy even outside of our own ecosystem. So like for me this is actually a big bet.
Yeah. So it's and it's something that no one else is really doing. And so this is a a space that we're excited by. And so, you know, uh we launched a sale of product called Alpha Goats at the start of this year. And this was a series of AI agents that players could compete could buy to compete against one another within Goat Gaming and win prizes. And so, as we started building out the Alph Goat personality, we were like, okay, we need like a hero asset, like a

like a very powerful proof of concept, and then everything would derive from what we develop for this. And that's how Amy came into being. And so it was always in service of the players, but it's really taking on a life of its own.
Let's stay with the Alpha Goats for a moment. I just want to understand that because Amy is the start. Now we have Alpha Goats. How does that work in play in game play? For example, they unlock opportunities for players. How does that work? And and how what does that game play look like?
I mean, firstly, you create almost like a sandbox for these AI agents to compete against each other. You can think of almost like Pokemon or I guess like football manager in a way where you're not actively participating but you're strategizing and deciding how they evolve and
right
what their tactics should be and you give them feedback on works and what doesn't work. So
you have this set of games where they can compete and you're training them and you're getting rewards from that. And then the other thing we wanted to do,

which is why we started with Amy, was like, okay, if you have your alpha builds at a certain tier, then they can have their own social media profile. They can start posting and they can be almost like a AI representation of yourself or whatever personality you really want to give them.
You can unleash them on social media to
create content for you. And so as we were fleshing that out, I said, "Okay, let's build a really amazing proof of concept." And so that's how Amy came into being. So that was like the V1 of the alpha codes, but players will start to get their hands on these tools uh hopefully in the not too distant future.
What have the impacts and the results have been since you've launched Amy and you've been introducing all this?
Yeah, fantastic. I mean like on the socials, you know, uh baseline activity within our Telegram chats is up like 2 3x. When she runs events, this stuff goes up to like
uh well 5x what our current day is. to what like 10x what we used to have. Uh she runs prize pots which are very popular with players and been a great uh

great source of activity for us. You know we've seen for some events like 50% of players like connect their wallets to engage which is very rare in like this space but typically if you're getting 10% it's very good.
Um players DM her all the time to chat with her. you know, she has a good days and a bad days where she goes off script and she's less helpful, but you know, she's improving and we're finding ways to to create an experience which is just fun for people and people want to chat with her and sort of come in. And so this is why, as I mentioned earlier, I'm thinking a lot about ways that we can have her just be more helpful as well, like something that people want to maybe add to their own communities.
Is that what you're thinking that, you know, she will be the helper, the the guide? Well, I was going to say we think of goat gaming like an arcade
or maybe a carnival and she's the host. When you come in, she's the face of it. She'll help you on board. She'll give you advice. Maybe she'll track how you're doing and give you personalized

offers based on the stuff that you like, which is something that actually we're trying to build out right now. Um, and then maybe in other communities, maybe she can also run events there and then the people that own those communities can maybe benefit from that as well. So we could, you know, have some kind of affiliate system or something.
So Simon, you've obviously invested in this hugely. You know, you you've you've kind of gone all in. Um, do you have any advice for studios and for teams who are looking at AI but haven't started yet or who are maybe tinkering with it, but who might want to go deeper and build with AI, not just around it.
I think it's it's not easy for people to change how they work or even how they think, right? So when you're
working with AI, you become less of an individual operator and more like a manager. You have to think of yourself almost like managing an intern. So you have you have to be get very careful with the instructions you give because you get the law of unintended consequences if your instructions are vague. You can get amazing results if

you're very specific.
But I think for anyone really serious about getting up to speed with this stuff like there's a wealth of resources out there. Anyone can install winds or cursor to get started and just start prompting And I'd say just go and start building your own software and play with the tools like and there's so much uh knowledge out there and people sharing on Reddit and Twitter and wherever else. So also like people are quite friendly in this space more so than traditional games even I'd say like if within the AI community if you ask for help like people will generally actually want to help and like people share their workflows. So, I consume a lot of AI content uh via podcast and social media. So, I'm constantly learning new stuff. But there's no substitute just for getting your hands dirty. But I do think it has to like you have to also like live it as a leader. So, my co-founder and I are both neck deep in this stuff every day. Like I mentioned earlier, like I'm not a developer by trade, you

know, I have a music degree. Uh so, I'm not the world's greatest programmer. Uh it's not really how my brain is wired, but um you know, I've been able to build applications from scratch. You know, I have a a virtual assistant that sits in Telegram called Albert and Albert helps me schedule my meetings. He shares all my media links, my like profile, headshot, just makes my life easier.
We were chatting before before this session and uh you just built built another one actually um just what what's that one about? Just curious. So, it's actually a a fitness tracker powered by Amy. And so, you can send Amy pictures of what you ate or send her a voice note with a description and she'll like give you the macros. Uh you can set your profile up and so she'll give you a protein and macro targets for the day. You can also track your steps and your activity either by sending screenshots of your health tracker, typing or talking to her
and then you get like daily summaries. Actually, maybe I can just pull up on my

phone. I was just playing with it earlier. Let me see if this works. It's the curse of the demo because it's unfinished. Here you go. You got Amy there and she's I don't know if you can see that very clearly, but she's giving me all my macros for the day. And
wow,
I just built this on my own and I might might post it later. But yeah, we're going to find like additional fun things for people to do. And it's all AI powered so it's all kind of give me like pretty accurate like information.
I like that because you're going for a goal. I mean it's like there is an element of gameplay in everything, Brian. Yeah. Right. So, you know, saving money or losing weight or whatever.
We we talk about this so so often, Peggy, is everything's becoming a little bit more playful, a little bit more fun. If you've got an Apple Watch or a fitness tracker, you're already gamifying your activity. So, building around that, and again, to come back to Amy as an agent,
you know, it creates so many roots into everything else that Goat is doing. you were in an interview with our friend Dave over at AI Game Changers and you

said if you're competing on cheap labor, you will get wiped out by AI. And you said that a little bit earlier um in our show as well. But then you have to say to yourself, okay, well, if that's the case, then what do studios need to be rethinking to say we need a production process or we need hiring? I'm I'm talking to people. They were on our show, Brian. It was like
we're not always looking at hiring now from other game studios or hiring from our competition. We're going outside beyond games
and even internally like we're having discussions. It's like okay this headcount opens up. It's like do you actually really need to hire that person or can we optimize our internal workflows and then have you doing something that's more high value?
So what does that look like? I mean, it reminds me of that cartoon I love where uh there's a little girl talking. Does I know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be the prompt engineer for my dream job. Is that where we're going?

Uh yeah, honestly, I don't think that's far off. But I think actually prompting well is a is a skill. There is a lot of art to it and you need a lot of technical knowledge because the more technical knowledge you can input into the prompt, more refined the prompt, the better the output. Uh so yeah I do think that prompts engineering and both for art and engineering and design and whatever will develop in their own right as like specialist fields but the work is more architectural I'd say like designing systems and trying to think through problems and like high level thinking rather than like you know I remember when I used to be a designer like spending three days populating a spreadsheet. I literally built one of those spreadsheets in 10 minutes using Claude. can basically create all these sliders and you can see the numbers going up and down but it's like this would have taken me like two days in Excel. So yeah I think the kind of work that people do changes
and to stick on that point just for a minute Simon so for founders business leaders and teams out there what is it

that they're going to have to look at differently how are they going to have to approach the production models that they're currently using? Do you think we're at any point near producing the skills we'll need to make games in the next 5 to 10 years?
Uh I think most studios are a long way off it. So even when I look at the curriculum that's being like taught universities, someone was sharing something recently like I was like this is two years out of date.
It's a problem, right? The the course takes a year to write.
So by the time it goes live it's like a couple of years out. they don't always update it every year or update everything.
And so I think people have to really like get their hands dirty, get their hands on the tools, start using them, and then start asking themselves, which is what we did. It's like what can we automate? And anything we can automate must be automated to give ourselves that edge and then we ship much faster. And then that gives us more space for experimentation and trying new things

and figuring stuff out.
And then people need to have more of an experimental mindset. I think people will have to be okay with the fact that you're not going to get paid to write thousands of lines of code anymore because like computers can generate that same code in a fraction of the time. So how do you think about your work and your work is probably more about designing and thinking through problems and trying to think ahead because like the AI will do exactly what you tell it to and often that's not a good thing. So actually having that knowledge and that foresight and so you know this takes a 10x developer and it makes them 100x developer whereas maybe a 1x a normal developer only gets like a 3 to 5x boost.
So I want to come back to you Simon um you know 20 year gaming veteran uh with leadership stops at Ubisoft King big point co-founder of Mighty Barrett Games. So you have an impressive track record and as you said before you also have a degree in music so this was not the path you have no

you have taken the path less traveled for sure how are you tapping into your creative roots to to build your leadership role in AI native design. Maybe there's a lesson in there for others who are feeling that oh I'm out of my comfort zone. Well look Simon was too. I've built many games of my own that I could have never like, you know, got signed off within my team because there's no way they'd be worth building for us as a studio. And so it's actually given me a lot more artistic expression uh both on the create like the visual side like creating assets through prompting and learning more about that. I actually learned a lot more about art in the last couple of years than the previous 18 because I was creating my own output and then I'd sit down with my co-founder or someone from the team. and get them to give me feedback on what I was doing wrong from to learn about that. Um, and even with like the fitness app or other stuff that I've built, like these are just really interesting learning and creative experiments for me around problem solving. So, I've always

been someone I mean like you said like past life traveled and always absorbing a lot of influences. I mean, when you were talking about saving money earlier, like being a game, I literally wrote it down because I think Amy might make a little saving money game now. And so there's all these things that you can absorb from just walking around.
Uh and with AI, you can give life to them. And during the financial crisis, I was actually in a really bad spot. I used to work for a company called Empire Interactive. Brian, you might remember it.
Uh yeah,
they went under I was owed months of salary. I was someone who was living paycheck to paycheck. It's like 25. I hadn't been out of uni that long. And um I didn't work for nearly nine months. And it was it was really bleak. I mean, I was so poor I couldn't take the metro. I had to walk everywhere in London. But, um, I was just saying someone the other day, like, if I lost my job today, I would just be heads down just building stuff with AI and shipping an app a week and just seeing if I can start stacking apps that make maybe 5 10k a year. Like, not

not mega bucks by any stretch, but get a few thousand users paying to subscribe to something and like before you know it, you have like a pretty good business running. So, like if you've got free time, like this is really probably the at least in my career, the best time to have a lot of free time on your hands because there's so much you can build and so much you can be learning and you'd be light years ahead of everyone else because it's so early.
It's a great story. That's a great story and inspiring because it's like, you know, what do you need? You need ideas, you need time, tools you have. So, you're augmented. It's almost like it's almost like, you know, something out of Marvel here. You know, I am a superpower and and if you build the one for the uh for the uh saving money, right? You're going to name it Peggy.
Sure. Peggy by Amy.
Peggy by Amy. That is so cool. It's a helpful name. There aren't many Peggies out there. In fact, I think I'm the only one in mobile that I can find.
I've not met many throughout my career. No,
I'm with you, Simon. I think the the

opportunity to play and experiment and and just try new things is is huge. So, what's next for for Goat Games, Simon? Where are you where are you taking this over the next 12 months?
Well, we have more games coming to go gaming. So, I don't know how close you guys are to the Telegram ecosystem, but there are some collectibles have been very popular in the Telegram ecosystem. So, we're making a game based off one of those. Uh, it's a crime themed base builder. Uh, it's called Grand Theft Pepe. Pepe is in the frog and he's a little crime boss that has to basically make money so he can buy more NFTs. Uh, so that's coming out within the Telegram ecosystem. But we have more games planned for that. And obviously there's a lot coming for Amy. So Amy's going to be running her own games, her own events. Uh, she has her own services she's going to start offering as well. So
very excited to see where that goes. I think we I think we've done a couple of

live examples of it as well, but she does live live text as well. So, you can speak to and she'll speak back
and so we might start having her as a guest on certain podcasts as well.
Um say, can I the two of you on the next podcast? We'll have you.
Yeah,
we have you and we Amy and maybe like in six months we just check in. I think that would be so cool. I think right now there's a there's still a chance you'll go rogue, but yeah, give me another couple of months.
I will stay in touch. I want to do that. That is that is breaking new ground, Brian. We will have Simon and we will have Amy.
Oh, I I'm I'm I'm in. I'm absolutely in. It's I mean, obviously, it will only be another six months until she takes our jobs as well, Peggy. But
she'll be the third co-host here.
This has been genuinely mind-blowing and fascinating. Um I think you both caught Peggy and I goping um a couple of times during the interview because it you you've absolutely opened my eyes certainly um to some of the use cases,

some of the ways of thinking about AI I had not considered. So thank you. Before we let you go, we're going to bring it right back to the heart of things which we do for all of our guests which is ask about games. And we have two questions we ask all of our guests. One is what is it you're playing right now that's maybe taking up more time than you would like it to? And secondly, favorite game of all time.
Wow. Um
Oh, yes.
So, we're on mobile.
Obviously, aside from go gaming, I'm playing a game called uh Kingshot. So, Kingshot is a mobile free-to-play game.
Uh it's a very fun kind of base building game, Kingshot. And then the other one that I've been checking out is uh on console. I've been replaying GTA 5 in anticipation for GTA 6, which I think a lot of people are doing right now. Um, my favorite game of all time is probably still the Ocarina of Time, uh, which is the Zelda from the N64, which for me was like the first game I played that really blew me away.
Yeah, very solid choices there all

round. I think I don't think anyone's going to argue with any of those. Um, and The Ocarina of Time is is a absolutely stone cold classic. Um and yeah, Simon, this is this has honestly been a total joy and a completely fascinating um interview. H So we I can't thank you enough for coming and joining us.
You are a builder, Simon, but what you're building is far greater than what you are building just within Goat Gaming. So it was a delight. It was an honor and uh and we can say we interviewed one of the pioneers way back when, Brian.
Oh yes, I can't wait. Well, we do we do so many, you know, our who's who lists is just significant, but it's always nice to be able to sort of say, you know, we were we were there as we spoke to Simon just before Amy took over the entire world and consolidated all gamers into one community.
We will have you back, Simon. Been great. Thanks again.
Thank you very much. Cheers.

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